Sales engagement and customer retention go hand-in-hand and that’s exactly why your Sales and Marketing departments need to be on the same page.

By speaking with our customers, we know that sales engagement and customer retention are often at the top of their list in terms of difficulty to manage. When you add a lack of collaboration and sharing of information internally across your sales and marketing teams, that’s when the wheels can really fall off!

Sales and marketing teams have more than one thing in common but the biggest commonality of all is KPIs and goals. Both teams strive to contribute towards a business gaining more customers, building brand awareness and increasing profits. By working together, sales and marketing teams can share resources and insights, save time, stress and inevitably, loads of effort by refining sales pipelines together to better attract and concentrate on the quality leads.

So how do you get collaborating? A good way to start is by mapping out your ideal customer and then refining the qualifying process. Most Marketing departments spend a lot of time working up buyer personas, consisting of profiles for ideal customers. The personas will typically include everything from age, gender, painpoints, likes/dislikes and so on.

Remember, if you’re working in Communications or Marketing, intel from the people on the ground who are speaking directly to customers (that’d be your sales colleagues), is priceless. They know what your customers want and the questions/concerns that ultimately prevent people from buying on the spot. These personas also explore the language buyers typically use when talking about a product - the best salespeople speak their customer’s language so again, this is super important information that needs to be shared across teams.

Building buyer personas with input from the sales team who are on the ground talking to customers, gives you a holistic view of your business’ ideal leads and makes for a great foundation to your sales funnel. It also ensures both departments are aligned in any decision-making and that you’re tackling the painpoints for the same target market. While sales bring their insights from interacting with customers directly, marketing bring their industry and market research.

From there, an experienced sales pro can easily use these profiles to help qualify their leads, which will see their conversion rates soar, eventually requiring less and less leads over time. If people aren’t quite ready to buy, grab an email address that you can pass back to your marketing team who can gradually build the relationship and nurture the lead until they are ready.

Making the lead generation and qualification process more efficient

You can turbocharge your lead gen process by developing lead scoring and a process that qualifies a marketing lead to a sales lead. When both sales and marketing are working together, you keep those lines of communication open as to what’s working and what isn’t. The end result: both teams have a better understanding of each other and areas where improvement is needed. Sales can explain to the marketing team which leads are higher quality (meaning a lead is further along in the sales process) and why. And marketing can explain where leads have not been followed up on and are falling through the funnel. Ensuring that these communication lines remain open is essential and using one source of truth such as a CRM system for all information and data is a great way of supporting the departments to continually be informed and aligned.

You can also develop content that works its way through the questions people are typically asking sales. Whether that ends up looking like an FAQ page, a regular blog content schedule, a Guide of some kind or something else, that information is gold and shouldn’t be wasted or only privy to sales staff. So if you’re in Marketing, ask your colleagues for a list of questions that customers/potential customers ask most often.

Together Marketing and Sales teams can become a formidable force and ensure no one gets left behind. If people buy on the spot, great! If not, Marketing is tasked with re-engaging people - along with existing customers in your pipeline - to woo them back over time. The quality of the content produced will come back to the ability of sales teams to communicate effectively. Remember, both departments need to regularly communicate and hold meetings with each other to ensure alignment.

Eventually, sales teams will have a number of high-value content pieces at their fingertips to share far and wide such as infographics, brochures, white papers, blogs, ebooks, case studies… the possibilities are endless. Of course, these resources can then be shared wider still - via email databases, on social media, as a downloadable on your website and so on. Every piece of quality content helps to get that next sale over the line!

Need help with qualifying leads or creating a fantastic digital experience for customers? Contact Woven today.